Increasingly, health care workers are at risk of infection by blood-transmitted viral agents, particularly HIV and hepatitis-causing viruses. Virus infection can occur by contact with an infected body-fluid, where the person handling the sample has an area of broken skin, usually on the hands. Infection can also occur when a person receives an accidental puncture wound with a contaminated needle or other sharp instrument.
Because of the often severe consequences of accidental infection by an infectious agent such as a blood-borne vital agent, it is now standard practice for health care workers in medicine, dentistry, and blood banking to wear surgical latex gloves as a protective measure. Although such gloves are effective against certain types of blood transfer, they provide only limited protection to the wearer against accidental puncture by contaminated needles or other sharp instruments.
A variety of protective glove devices designed to prevent or reduce the risk of accidental blood transfer by puncturing have been proposed. One type of protective glove employs a flexible, puncture-resistant material, such as a polymer filament or metal-filament weave material, to resist penetration by sharp objects. Gloves having various puncture-resistant features are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,187,815, 4,942,626, 4,864,661, 4,742,578, 5,070,543, 4,951,689, 4,901,372, and 5,200,263.
The basic, but conflicting needs in a puncture-proof glove are high resistance to puncturing, requiring a strong physical barrier, and good touch sensitivity, requiring a thin and flexible barrier. To date, these conflicting needs have not been resolved satisfactorily.
In a variant of the puncture-proof glove, the glove is provided with puncture proof pads at selected finger positions on the glove. These pads may be placed at fixed positions on the glove, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,864,661, or may float within a pair of flexible-expanse layers, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,259,069.
Another type of protective glove construction provides chambers within the glove's interior for holding anti-microbial agents in solution form, as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,335,373. Puncturing the glove then releases the agent, which can then help sterilize the puncture site or inhibit microbial growth at the puncture site. A limitation with this approach is that the events leading to a puncture wound usually happen quite quickly, before solution agents can be dispensed effectively onto the puncturing instrument or into the wound site.
It would thus be useful to provide a glove- or finger-protective device that provides significant protection against infection by accidental puncture wounds with contaminated needles or the like, and which, at the same time, can be designed with a total thickness and flexibility that gives good touch sensitivity through the glove material.